BP Profile Search › Order by distance (using xProfile Location Fields)
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We’re using the xProfile Location plugin and have added multiple location fields to each member’s profile.
We need to be able to search the directory and order the results by distance based on these location fields.
Any ideas on how best to approach this?
Hi Waloob73,
I’m working on this feature and probably I’ll be able to release it before the end of this year.
BP Profile Search will support BP xProfile Location and any other plugin providing location data, but those plugins (or any interested user) will have to provide their own search function.
I’ll be in touch with the author of BP xProfile Location to talk about this, but if you are a programmer and are interested in this topic you can keep an eye on my page Custom Field Types.
Basically I’m going to add the new CPFT format location but, since the location data are not stored in a standard data table, the CPFT authors will have to provide their custom search function.
Hello everybody, I made a search by distance plugin based on BP Profile Search so we can search members in a range of kilometers. The geocoding is based on GeoNames database, it has an advantage for privacy by using self-hosted data instead of sending third-party requests to Google servers (which can also be blocked in some countries).
I am available as freelance developer so if someone is interested, you can contact me via the website on my profile.It looks like the website of people who comment is not displayed. You can contact me here. By the way, I cannot access your website anymore with my VPN, a blank page is displayed.
Hello Baptiste,
Great to hear you made a search by distance plugin, it will certainly benefit many users. Is it available in the public WP repository, or as a premium plugin?
About the access issue, I guess it’s a temporary glitch. If not, please feel free to contact me with more details.
Hi Andrea,
Yes, it was a temporary bug, I can access your website again.
I made the plugin because I started freelance development so it is a premium plugin (source available that you can edit and use on several websites you own) and will not be in the public WordPress repository. If it was available in the public repository, people would have to install the GeoNames database first, which is approximately 5 GB if you want to be able to do local geocoding for all cities in the world.
I also made a WebRTC webcam chat plugin for BuddyPress. It is premium also and would not be the best solution to add it in the public repository because it is using WebSocket for the signaling server (with Node.js) so it will not work on a shared hosting, you will need a VPS or dedicated server (or a paid third-party cloud service like Heroku).
I also noticed that if people use Tor Browser or a Linux distribution like Tails, your website does not load most of the time, it tries to load until there is a timeout. Depending on the IP address, it may load directly or ask to complete a Google Captcha from bitninja.io service.
Hello Baptiste,
Thank you for the additional details on your work. All the interested readers can contact Baptiste on his website.
About the issues with Tor, I’m not using captchas, so I guess they are implemented by my ISP as part of their security measures.
